Polterheist: An Esther Diamond Novel

by Laura Resnick

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  Having passed through the security barrier that was keeping people out of the Enchanted Forest now, Twinkle came trotting over to us, looking a little tired—possibly because he was still lugging around his instrument. He was alone.

  “Still no EMTs?” Lopez asked with a frown.

  I said, “I really don’t need—”

  “Oh, they’re here,” said Twinkle. “But right after they arrived on this floor, they got an emergency call to go up to the sixth floor instead, since there were no serious injuries down here.”

  “Why were they needed on the sixth floor?” Lopez asked.

  “Mr. Fenster had a heart attack!”

  “Whoa!” I said. “Just now?”

  “Preston Fenster?” When Twinkle nodded in response, Lopez asked, “Did they say what happened?”

  “Ms. Fenster-Thorpe said that when they heard about what had just happened down here—the tree going haywire and attacking people—Mr. Fenster went red as a beet and started screaming at the top of his lungs about how that was it, he was going to close down Solsticeland now, he wasn’t even going to wait until the end of the season . . . And then he started breathing heavily, clutched his chest, and keeled over.”

  “Is he alive?” Lopez asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Alive and kicking. They’re going to take him to the hospital, but he’s still upstairs right now,” said Twinkle. “Actually, I thought he looked pretty good by the time I left to come back down here.”

  “You went to the sixth floor with the EMTs?”

  “Yeah. I thought you’d want a full report, officer.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  “No problem. I was kind of curious. I’ve heard all these stories about the Fensters from Jingle, you know, and I’ve seen them around the store—Oh! There’s one now, in fact.” He pointed across the forest. “But I never met any of them before.”

  I looked in the direction Twinkle had pointed—and I flinched when I saw her.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Lopez.

  “That’s Elspeth Fenster,” I said anxiously. “Preston’s daughter.”

  “Yeah? What’s she doing down here?” Lopez wondered. “You’d think she’d want to be with her father right now.”

  “Oh, I don’t think they’re very close,” I said.

  “They’re not,” Twinkle confirmed. “I saw her upstairs, too. It would be exaggerating to say she seemed glad to see her father lying on a stretcher . . . Well, no, maybe not exaggerating.”

  What a family.

  “But, actually, none of the family members seem that worried,” Twinkle continued. “Not even Mr. Fenster himself. I gather this happens kind of a lot. Him having chest pains and keeling over, I mean.”

  “Even so,” Lopez muttered, “you’d think he’d realize that one of these days will be the last time, and maybe make an effort to change his ways before then.”

  I nodded, keeping a cautious eye on the goth girl as I said, “Preston Fenster really does seem like a mortality statistic looking for a place to settle down and build a tombstone.”

  Elspeth looked this way and spotted me. I gasped and edged a closer to Lopez. He was armed; that might come in handy.

  “It sounds like her dad might have reason to be a little tense around her,” he said to me, “but why does she make you nervous?”

  Elspeth started clumping gracelessly in this direction. I said urgently to Lopez, “She’s one of the vamparazzi.”

  He frowned. “Are you sure? I know she looks the part, but—”

  “Yes, I’m sure! We’ve already had a confrontation. I don’t want another one.” Losing my nerve, I slipped behind Lopez, standing on my toes to look over his shoulder at Elspeth.

  “Okay, I’ll handle this,” he said soothingly, well aware of what I’d endured at the hands (and fists and feet) of the vamparazzi only a month or two ago. “Stay where you are. I’ll deal with her.”

  Joining us, Elspeth peered at me over Lopez’s shoulder, jerked a thumb at Twinkle, and asked, “Did this guy get it right? Are you the one who got mauled by the tree?”

  I nodded, watching her warily.

  “He thought you could’ve died,” she said. “Is that right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So what was that like?” she asked with interest—and with a peculiar absence of any sort of sympathy or empathy. “Were you scared shitless? Oh, did you shit yourself? Elf boy says there was a foul odor that—”

  “Miss Fenster,” said Lopez, “don’t you think your father needs—”

  “Twinkle!” I blurted. “You smelled it, too?”

  “I never implied it was Dreidel!” Twinkle said indignantly to Elspeth. “But, uh, I think somebody must have . . . You know.”

  “So tell me what it was like,” said Elspeth. “Thinking you might die.”

  I stared at her with dislike, unwilling to answer. She had the right idea about Naughty and Nice, but she otherwise struck me as a repellant person. Her whole family was horrible, and her father seemed like a real bastard; but while that explained Elspeth’s behavior to some extent, it didn’t excuse it.

  To be fair, I had met some very nice vampire fans during my sojourn as Lord Ruthven’s hapless victim in The Vampyre. I had also encountered many perfectly harmless people among the vamparazzi.

  I didn’t know if Elspeth was the sort of vamp fan who physically attacked me, started violent altercations with other fans, stormed police barricades, broke into the theater, and/or rampaged backstage (the run of that show was one rough ride, let me tell you). Maybe, maybe not. I suspected she probably was one of the legions of fans who chatted on the internet about wanting to die in Lord Ruthven’s (and/or Daemon Ravel’s) toothy embrace; but this was only a guess.

  But even if she was just a harmless vampire groupie with a healthy awareness of the difference between fantasy and reality . . . I found something really distasteful about the murky light of clinical and slightly malicious interest in her black-rimmed eyes now as she questioned me about the frightening and dangerous incident I had just been through.

  Lopez evidently shared my opinion. He said, “Miss Fenster, I suggest you return to your father’s side. He needs his family around him right now.”

  Elspeth snorted with amusement. “You don’t know the family, do you?”

  Lopez tried another angle. “If he’s going to the hospital, he’ll need an immediate family member present to assist with—”

  “We have staff for that,” Elspeth said dismissively.

  “All the same, miss . . .”

  Her gaze, which had mostly focused on me so far, now shifted to Lopez. She looked a little annoyed. “Oh . . . I’ll bet you’re one of the cops who was upstairs before, meeting with my father and my aunt.”

  When he confirmed this, Elspeth’s gaze drifted down his body, then back up to his face. I could tell by the change in her expression that, now that she had bothered to look at him, she was recognizing what an attractive man he was. As the saying goes, he was a guy you definitely wouldn’t kick out of bed for eating crackers there. Her attitude underwent another peculiar shift. Not friendly to him, exactly, but interested in him now. No longer dismissive. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Detective Lopez.”

  “No, your name,” she said.

  “Detective Lopez,” he repeated firmly.

  That made her scowl. “Whatever.”

  She looked away, avoiding his gaze after that, reverting to being dismissive of him.

  “And since we still don’t know whether this area is safe,” Lopez told her, “this isn’t a good place for you to be right now, miss.”

  “The little elf hiding behind you is the one who nearly got killed here,” Elspeth said. “Not me.”

  “We’re leaving this area in a minute, too,” said Lopez.

  In another swift change of attitude, Elspeth let her breath out in an exasperated gush, crossed her arms defensively
over her chest, and looked around like someone waiting for a bus—which was something I suspected she had never actually done. “Is Rick around? I want to talk to him.”

  “Super Santa?” said Twinkle. “Yeah, I think he’s still on the clock.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That stupid name.”

  “He’s on the floor right now,” I said. “He won’t be able to talk for a while.” It seemed very fitting to me, though, that Elspeth was seeking out someone with training in psychology.

  “I’m heading for the throne room,” said Twinkle. “Can I give him a message for you?”

  Elspeth didn’t even reply. Without bothering to take her leave of us, she turned around and walked away.

  Twinkle called after her, “Oh, Miss Fenster? Do you think your aunt maybe liked my idea? I mean, I could go and talk to the guys in tech and give them—”

  “She hated it,” Elspeth said, without bothering to turn her head and look back at the elf. “It was stupid.”

  Seeing that Twinkle looked crestfallen, I asked, “What was your idea?”

  “While I was upstairs keeping Ms. Fenster-Thorpe company, I told her I thought we could do a really cool display in the Solsticeland sky on Christmas Eve,” he said.

  “A bright star shining in the East?” Lopez said. “I think it’s been done.”

  Twinkle shifted the weight of his accordion and stretched out his hands overhead, looking up at the starlit sky. “I want to stage a lunar eclipse,” he said grandly.

  “On Christmas Eve?” Lopez asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because we’re gonna have one on Christmas Eve!” Twinkle added, “I’m treasurer of the Astronomy Club at college.”

  “Of course you are,” I said, unsurprised by this.

  “A lunar eclipse on Christmas Eve!” Twinkle repeated. “Do you know what that means?”

  “It’ll be dark?” Lopez guessed.

  “Uh-huh.” Twinkle nodded enthusiastically. “Right!”

  “This is solstice,” I said. “It’s dark all the time, anyhow.” Or, at least, it sure felt like all the time, since I was always stuck inside Fenster & Co.

  “No, really dark,” said Twinkle. “The darkest season, the longest nights of the year . . . made even more profound on that holy night by a lunar eclipse!”

  “Okay,” I said. “Lunar eclipse. Dark. I get it.”

  “You don’t get it.” Twinkle’s eyes gleamed behind his bottle-bottom lenses. “This is the first lunar eclipse on Christmas Eve in over four hundred years!”

  “Four hundred years?” I repeated in surprise. “Wow. That’s since before M . . .”

  “Hmm?” said Lopez.

  “That’s a really long time,” I amended.

  I had started to say “since before Max was born;” but Max’s age was a secret, for obvious reasons. He didn’t want to get committed to a psychiatric ward. (Neither did I.) He also didn’t want to become a science experiment, which was a fate he had already endured, albeit in other centuries.

  Max had unwittingly drunk an age-retarding elixir prepared by the absent-minded mage whose apprentice he had been back in, oh, the 1680s. Decades later, he finally noticed—since nothing slips by Max!—that he was aging unusually slowly and still had the appearance of a young man despite being nearly sixty.

  His colleagues in the Magnum Collegium—an obscure but important worldwide organization dedicated to confronting Evil in this dimension (apart from politics, which the Collegium shunned entirely, Max said)—soon became very interested in this phenomenon, and they insisted that Max submit periodically to various examinations, tests, and experiments. They wanted to find the formula which had altered his aging process. After a century or so of going along with this, though, Max decided to cease wasting any more of his long life in trying to find out why it was so long.

  The other reason I’d stopped myself in mid-sentence was that I usually tried not to mention Max around Lopez if it wasn’t strictly necessary. Lopez’s “thing” about Santa Claus was nothing compared to how bad-tempered he could be about Max, whom he considered a well-intentioned but dangerous madman—and that was Lopez’s opinion of Max on the days when he was feeling kind-hearted and generous toward him.

  “A lunar eclipse on Christmas Eve is that rare?” Lopez asked, looking up at the Solsticeland sky. “And we’ll get to see one this year? That’s pretty cool.”

  I looked up at the fake solstice sky overhead and felt Twinkle’s enthusiasm infecting me, too. I was impressed that, three nights from now, we’d witness a lunar event which had last occurred well before Max’s birth.

  I looked forward to telling my friend about it when I saw him later tonight. Although he probably knew, I realized. The movements of the celestial bodies seemed like the sort of thing Max would follow.

  “I think reproducing the event on Christmas Eve in Solsticeland is a nice idea, Twinkle,” I said. “Do you think Elspeth was right about her aunt hating it? Or was Goth Girl just being snide?”

  “Well . . . I didn’t really have the impression the idea went over well upstairs. Maybe my timing wasn’t so good,” he admitted, “pitching it to Ms. Fenster-Thorpe when her brother had just had a heart attack, medics and cops were all over the place, and—”

  “Twinkle!” Candycane called irritably from somewhere in the North Pole. “TWINKLE!”

  “Oops. I’d better get to work. Later, Dreidel. Bye, officer.” The elf trotted off in the direction of Candycane’s summons.

  I turned to ask Lopez if he was serious about interviewing me on an official basis, but he was gazing across the landscape of Solsticeland with a frown on his face.

  “I think we are having an electrical fire, after all,” he said in alarm. “Is that smoke?”

  “Where?”

  “Stay here.” Moving swiftly, he went through the forest toward the west wall.

  I followed him. (Other people comply when Lopez gives orders. Me, not so much.)

  He approached the same trio of thick tree trunks where Rick and I had located the grimacing gnome earlier today. And I realized he was right: There was smoke. I could see it in the dim light of Solsticeland now that I knew where he was looking.

  But based on the way it was rising in a thin coil from behind the three trunks, then lazily dispersing itself through the surrounding air, I didn’t think it was the start of an electrical fire.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Lopez said a moment later, and I knew for sure what the source of that smoke was. “Are you kidding me?”

  I came to his side. He was so exasperated with our quarry that he forgot to be annoyed that I had followed him rather than staying where I was.

  Her face and torso mostly hidden by the bunched-up folds of her voluminous white ball gown, Princess Crystal sat huddled in the hollow next to the grinning gnome, puffing away on a cigarette.

  “What are you doing?” Lopez demanded.

  I said, “She’s having a cigarette.”

  “I can see that,” he said with forced patience. “I mean, why here?”

  Cigarette dangling from her lips, Princess Crystal said in her throaty voice, “I can’t get out to the fire escape when it’s not my break.”

  “What?” Lopez snapped.

  “The fire escape is the only place she’s allowed to smoke,” I explained, “and only when she’s on break. If she tried to go out there now, she’d be noticed.”

  Crystal took a long drag, then said, while smoke poured from her nostrils and mouth, “God, it is inhuman to expect me to go so long without a cigarette!”

  “But she can usually disappear for five minutes without Miles noticing, so she has some favorite spots around the store where she goes for a smoke.” I added, “I didn’t know this was one of them. Crystal, did you know this whole area is pretty much off-limits for the rest of the night?”

  “Yeah, no visitors. So I figured I wouldn’t be seen.”

  Looking as if he suspected she suffere
d from brain damage, Lopez pointed out, “There’s been an accident here, and there are police, security guards, and maintenance workers roaming around this area.”

  “But no Miles!” she said triumphantly. “Perfect spot.”

  “You can’t stay here,” Lopez said firmly. “Come on, get out of there.”

  “Says who?” Princess Crystal challenged.

  “NYPD.”

  “Shit!” She stubbed out her cigarette in the gnome’s ear. “NYPD? Are you serious? I can’t believe how strict Fenster’s is about this!”

  “Come on,” Lopez said. “Let’s go.”

  I stepped back, waiting for Crystal to emerge. There was some rustling of cloth, some grunting, and then more rustling, followed by some cursing.

  She said, “I’m trapped! It’s this damn dress. Can you help me out of here?”

  She stuck her hands out of the hollow, flapping them at us. Lopez and I each grabbed one hand and heaved. There was a moment of suspense, then Crystal and her dress popped out of the tree trunk like a cork coming out of a bottle.

  She started straightening her billowing gown. “Damn it! You tore it! How am I going to explain that?”

  Lopez said, “I’m sure you have somewhere you should be right now.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be getting proposed to?” I asked.

  “Oh, crap, is it nearly time for that?” She grabbed Lopez’s wrist to check his watch. “You’re right. Gotta go!”

  She lifted her heavy white skirts and dashed off, trotting through the Enchanted Forest toward Solstice Castle. From this angle, she actually looked like a fairytale princess running to meet her prince.

  Gazing after her, Lopez said, “I’m starting to feel like I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole.”

  “Yeah, I think that feeling is to be expected around here.”

  “Does Fenster’s keep these people locked away somewhere and just take them out every November, letting them roam the fourth floor for a few weeks before they go back into cold storage for another year?”

  “Please don’t suggest that to the family,” I said. “It sounds like something they’d consider trying.”

  “Why are you working here?” he asked.